The influences of Harper Lee and Anne Tyler are strongly present in this winning, if borderline-sentimental, second novel by the author of the wistful Sam’s Crossing (1993). “I spent a large part of my childhood on the other side of doors or just around corners,” Jeru Lamb confesses—while narrating in retrospect the story of his afflicted family’s attempts to heal itself in the aftermath of a loss that coincided with the assassination of a beloved President (JFK) and the dying spasms of segregation in their complacent South Carolina hometown (Greenville). The shadow cast over them was the death of Jeru’s younger brother Mitchell, when a dog the boys had always teased broke loose and savagely mauled Mitchell—a fate that guilt-ridden Jeru narrowly escaped. The Lambs (a beautifully chosen name) cope with their loss in various ways dictated by their differing natures. Jeru’s mother Muriel resorts to Christian Science and becomes pregnant again—to the despair of her husband Warren, who has quit his job and works obsessively at a book whose subject he won’t reveal. And Jeru—an engaging ten-year-old compound of naãvetÇ and precocious insight—tiptoes around the edges of his family’s other secrets, slowly maturing into the realization that other people’s (seemingly remote) lives are every bit as sorrowful and fascinating as his own. Hays filters through Jeru’s increasingly sophisticated consciousness a moving picture of small-town racial relations in 1963, as well as fully rounded characterizations of even initially marginal figures like Jeru’s resourceful Aunt Louise and Uncle Clem, and the preternaturally knowing Norma Jones, a schoolmate who holds the key to all he doesn’t know about his family. Not a totally original story (there’s a lot of To Kill a Mockingbird in it), but a mighty appealing one. Oprah will want to check out Tommy Hays.
Pub Date: July 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-50211-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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